New Decameron Eighty-One: Jon Evans

The End Of The Worldcon

By Jon Evans

Day One

I first noticed them at my first panel, “Modern Tulpamancers: Religious Fact Or Science Fiction?” I was scanning the audience before taking a seat, looking for Lauren with a combination of dizzy hope and stomach-wrenching terror, when they walked past. Even in my distracted state they were hard not to notice: a woman wearing a pink bunny onesie with floppy ears, and a dreadlocked man in a white Utilikilt, purple furry boots, and a skin-tight tie-dyed T-shirt. Both also bore the rigid wince of people who have just realized they are somewhat inappropriately dressed.

They sat in the back. Lauren was not present. I took a seat near the door, so I would see her if she entered, and wondered briefly about that colorful couple. They didn’t look young enough to be completely clueless. First-time attendees, misinformed by some practical joker that Worldcon’s de facto sartorial standard was like that of Burning Man? Had they heard that the con commenced with the Masquerade party? Or did they move in social circles which dressed up like that all the time?

The tulpa talk mostly went over my head. Afterwards I ducked outside to vape some THC and a little 2CB, because the next panel that interested me was “The Psychogeometry of Hive Minds” and I thought some psychoactives might help. I was about to re-enter when that couple emerged, now changed into flared jeans and fractal shirts, like half the con wore. I wouldn’t have paid them any attention if I hadn’t noticed them before, but because I had, I lingered a little, and pretended to vape some more while watching them sidelong, still trying to figure out their story.

They seemed…aghast. They looked up the street at the riot police protecting CBC HQ from the tent city which occupied that block of Front Street, they craned their necks to gape at the ragged severed neck of the CN Tower and the swarms of drones rebuilding it, and they exchanged a look that I would describe as horrified. As if they’d never seen anything like this before. As if Toronto the Good was some kind of awful dystopia. I almost wanted to shout at them: hey, you think this is bad? Try Brooklyn! Or London! At least we have a basic income here. It’s not much, but nobody starves.

I figured they had to be from Switzerland, or Singapore, or New Zealand; but when I passed them on the way back in, they were discussing lunch options in plain American English. Their mystery thickened—

—and then vanished entirely from my mind, because just inside the door, in the midst of dense foot traffic, I very nearly literally ran into Lauren.

“Uh,” I said, as all the scripts I had carefully prepared for this moment dissipated like memories of dreams. I felt cold and sick. My pulse thundered through my veins. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She looked like she wanted to keep moving.

“I’m really sorry,” I blurted out.

“Yes. You said that before. Several times.”

I could tell by her clipped tone and affect-free expression that she too was desperately upset by our encounter, which gave me a twisted kind of hope; at least it wasn’t indifference. I pleaded, “Can we go somewhere and talk? I want to make it up to you. I want to make everything up to you.”

“No. You don’t understand. This isn’t a question of something you did wrong you have to put right.”

“Then what is it?”

I dreaded the answer that didn’t come. Instead she demanded, angrily. “What are you even doing here? How dare you?”

“What do you mean? It’s a Worldcon. You knew I wanted to come. I’m a fan.”

“So? You knew I would be here. It’s not important to you like it is to me. This is my future I’m trying to build here, you understand? My whole professional life. If I keep running into you, I can’t—I just can’t.“

“I want to help.”

“Yeah?” She put a hand on her hip in the way that always made me want to kiss her. “Really? OK. You want to help? Then I want to know where you are. Text me your schedule. What panels, what parties. Before you go. And I get veto power. If I want to go somewhere you are, you have to leave.”

“I…” didn’t want to do that. At all.

“Figures. First you say you want to make it all up to me, then you reject the one thing I ask.”

“I’m not rejecting. But you said it wasn’t a question of making it up to you.”

“It isn’t. But it’ll at least prove your good faith.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Where are you going right now?”

“The Psychogeometry of Hive Minds.”

“Good. That sounds stupid. Stay away from me.”

She stalked off and disappeared into the crowd just as the weird couple entered. They looked like they were in a rush, almost like they were pursuing something, and disappeared in the same direction that she had. I went the other way.

She was right about that panel, but one of the panelists drew a kind of lattice on the smartboard while trying to explain decision flow, and that plus the 2CB at least kept my mind occupied with something other than thoughts of Lauren and exactly how badly I had screwed us up. Afterwards I texted her the rest of my schedule for the day. Then I decided to bail on it all, go up to my hotel room, and just get stoned alone and lie on my bed and weep for a while.

I should have known from the beginning that we wouldn’t work. I was trouble; she was innocence. Or so I had thought.

We met when I accidentally overdosed on a ketamine derivative. She was a nurse working the night shift in St. Joseph’s ER. A week later we ran into each other at Ben-Hur in High Park. I hardly remembered her, but she was cute, and about three sentences into our conversation I realized she’d somehow managed to develop a crush on me that night. I thought it would be fun to date briefly. Rock her world. Expand her horizons. Show her a little edge, a little kink, a glimpse of life’s darker sides. I thought I was the interesting person in the relationship. How little I knew. How wrong I was.

Then I had gone and thrown it away, thrown her away.

At dusk I began to stir. Old party-people habits die hard, I guess. I got up, cleaned up enough that it wasn’t quite so obvious that I had just spent the afternoon wallowing in teary despair, and went to the biggest con party on offer. I normally hated alcohol, the world’s first and worst drug, but tonight I wanted to get blind, stinking, crippling-hangover drunk. It was all I deserved.

En route I remembered to text my intent to Lauren. She did not reply.

This party was thrown by the team trying to bring next year’s Worldcon to Chennai. The suite was huge, but there were so many people that I took two Kingfishers from an immense cooler rather than have to fight my way to it again. It seemed like half the crowd were gargoyles, with wraparound glasses and earbuds augmenting their various levels of reality. I didn’t like that. I was still stuck on the real world. For all its gone-to-shitness it was all we really had.

I chatted with a few furries for a little while, but while I’d been to a few fun parties I wasn’t really one of them, and they could tell. So I moved to another room, and there they were in a corner, the previously weirdly costumed couple.

I didn’t dare let myself stand around the party with no one to talk to, not in the mood I was in, so I walked right up to them and demanded, “So what was with the outfits?”

They looked at me cautiously.

“I beg your pardon?” the man said, and I knew he wasn’t American, even though his accent was perfect.

“Your Utilikilt and onesie. At the panel this morning. They would have been fine here,” I nodded at the sea of gargoyles, furies, and winged fairies around us. “They just seemed a little premature.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “we only went to the parties last year.”

That almost sounded plausible. “Ah. How did you like it? I heard the hotel was pretty awful. Not as bad as Reno” — a generation ago, but still infamous — “but pretty bad.”

“Yes. Pretty bad.”

I forced a round of introductions. He was Bal, short for Balthazar; she was Ariel. He was tall, with slumped shoulders; she was short and moved twitchily, like a bird.

“So what’s your story?” I asked.

“We saw you earlier,” Ariel said as if she hadn’t heard my question. “Was that Lauren Ncube you were speaking to?”

I grunted involuntarily. My ears rang with her name. After a moment I realized they were staring at me. “Yes.”

“Do you know her?”

I shrugged. “Do you?”

“She’s done some interesting work.”

I was surprised to hear that. Lauren had only published three stories, in relatively obscure venues. Four more had been accepted, one to tor.com and one to Haikasoru West, and I expected a smattering of SF fans would begin to know her name after those dropped, but I didn’t expect her to become famous until The Changeling Wind was published. It was her first novel, and it was utterly brilliant, and she had sold it only last week, and that was what had somehow precipitated our fight. Our hiatus. Our breakup. Whatever it was.

My phone vibed. “Sorry,” I lied, and grabbed for it, hoping to avoid the subject of Lauren. The joke was on me: it was a text from her, telling me she was coming to the party, so I had to leave.

“Do you know her?” Ariel asked. “Do you know where we might find her?”

I knew there were few things that would give Lauren more joy than discovering that she had honest-to-God actual fans. So I did something arguably petty but inarguably awful. Something wrong and shitty and just plain mean. And, on reflection, something pretty significant. I said: “I know she’s supposed to be at the Seasteading party tonight. Not really her thing but she knows someone there. I was just about to go. Do you want to come along?”

They did.

“Where are you from?” Bal asked politely, as we waited for the elevator.

“Oh, I’m a local,” I said, “I couldn’t afford to go if this was anywhere else.”

“Where in Toronto?”

“The Junction.”

At that they exchanged a dismayed glance, just a flicker, but I caught it, though I didn’t understand.

“Have you been?” I asked.

Ariel shook her head, then asked, with faux-brightness, “So what’s your favorite story by Lauren Ncube?”

I winced, then considered, and answered: “Still Life With Stegosaurs.”

“Oh, yes, good choice,” Bal said, his previously placid face lighting up with unexpected enthusiasm, “there are just so many levels to that. It’s so complex for such a short work. And they all work brilliantly, both independently and together. That moment when the speciation algorithm is revealed? It’s just breathtaking.”

Then he shut his mouth with an almost audible snap, a stricken expression on his face, and both Ariel and I stared at him wordlessly for a few seconds, until the awkward silence was broken by the elevator’s arrival.

“…Where did you read it?” I asked quietly, once we were within.

“An submission copy,” Ariel said hastily. “We have friends in the industry.”

But that still didn’t make any sense. Because Lauren had finished the first draft of that story only two weeks ago, and she polished all of her work for months before submitting it, she was fanatical and merciless about it. Until five minutes ago I would have bet my admittedly meager life savings that I was the only other human being in this world who had read ‘Still Life With Stegosaurs.’

“Friends like who?” I asked.

She frowned anxiously. “I shouldn’t say. I’m sorry.”

She was lying. I was sure of it. Our walk down the corridor was uncomfortable. The Seasteading party was showing classic time-travel movies, but Bal and Ariel didn’t seem into it. In fact they seemed like they just wanted to get away from me. As Primer began they pled exhaustion and fled.

I texted Lauren: Has anyone other than me read STILL LIFE WITH STEGOSAURUS?

She wore back almost immediately: Leave me alone.

I responded: I’m only asking because I met someone who said she had.

She wrote: Bullshit. LEAVE ME ALONE. One more text and I’ll block you.

I tried to tell myself she didn’t really mean it, but that text hit me like a kick in the gut, seemed to drain all the joy from the world. I tried to mainline another beer but it tasted like liquid ashes. I left it half empty and went back to my room to wallow in my misery alone. I didn’t even feel like I deserved anything better.

Day Two

I woke up obsessing about that weird couple. How could they have read Lauren’s story? I didn’t buy that “industry connection” claim. There was something distinctly off about them both, something subtly but fundamentally wrong. Were they stalking Lauren? Had they hacked into her computer or broken into her apartment? Was she in danger?

A little part of me recognized, vaguely, that these were crazy thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them.

I had wanted to go to the “Your Process Is Weird” panel, but I knew Lauren would be there, and there was nothing else interesting. So instead I went and found my friend Travis, who was on the con committee. He was insanely busy, of course, but he was one of those wonderful people who always makes time for their friends, no matter what. I’m not like that. I wish I was. He took a few minutes to find out whether my claimed friends Balthazar and Ariel had booked through the con, and since they had, then yes, of course, he could give me their room number. He was so busy he didn’t even ask why.

There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the handle of their door. I stared at it for a moment, wondering what the hell I was doing. Then I knocked, planning to barge into the room and confront them about Lauren. But they weren’t home.

The hotel hall was empty except for a housekeeping cart in front of an open door, two rooms down from theirs.

An idea hit me. I was vaguely aware that it was both criminal and basically insane. But I pocketed the DO NOT DISTURB sign, walked down the hall, slipped through the door that led to the stairs, and waited, poking my head out every few minutes, until the cart was in front of their door. Their open door.

I didn’t give myself any time to think, I just walked straight in, past the man tidying up the bathroom towels, as if I owned the place, or had at least rented it for the night. “Sorry, just forgot something, be out of your hair in a second,” I assured him.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for, really. Just something that might explain what felt so off about them. Their room looked almost completely unlived-in, except for the unmade beds and the two navy-blue shoulder bags left slumped on the floor. Aha, I thought, and went to rifle through one—but there was no way in. There were goods within, both solid chunky things and bundled fabrics, I could feel them through the bag’s silky exterior, but it had no aperture at all. There weren’t even any seams.

I double- and triple-checked this inconvenient impossibility, then straightened back up and looked desperately around, even more confused. At least a minute had passed. I didn’t think I had much more time before the housekeeping man began to investigate my status more closely.

There was a small metal clamshell case on one of the bedside tables. I picked it up and opened it. Within was an intertwined mass of tiny little silvery worms, slowly writhing. Each was as long as a thumb is wide, and not much thicker than a human hair.

I was so viscerally disgusted by this tiny puddle of worms that I nearly dropped it. But that feeling faded when I realized they weren’t organic. They gleamed like metal because they were metal. Mechanical. Some kind of nanotech. Something I’d never even heard of before, even though, theoretically, this was my field.

Without thinking I extended a finger to brush against one, to see what it felt like; and it darted into me, disappeared into my skin like a flexible needle, leaving a single drop of my blood behind. I barely even felt a pinch.

I was so shocked that this time I did drop the little disc, spilling tiny silver worms all over the floor. For a moment I could see the one inside me wriggling beneath my skin, swimming up my finger like a salmon; then it reached my palm, went deeper, and was gone. Moving upstream. Heading for my heart.

I wanted to scream. I told myself it had to be a nightmare. But it wasn’t, it was happening. I turned around, heedless of the spilled worms, and fled for the door—only to find it blocked by Bal and Ariel. They looked, respectively, horrified and furious.

“What the fuck,” I demanded, and held up my hand accusingly. “One of your worm-things. It’s in me. It’s in me. What the fuck.” It was not my most eloquent hour but under the circumstances I think that can be excused.

“You’ll be fine,” Bal said, “it’s not armed with anything.”

“Not armed?”

Ariel looked at the housekeeper staring, concerned and confused, out of the hotel bathroom at the three of us. “We need to talk,” she informed me. “Bal, can you clean up here?” He nodded. “Good. Now, you,” she said to me, “let’s go have breakfast.”

On the elevator she was practically radiant with a mixture of rage and anxiety. So was I, at first. But as we descended towards the lobby, and the con, an explanation hit me.

“You’re not from here,” I said to her.

“No.”

“If I asked you where you were from, that would be the wrong question, wouldn’t it.”

She winced. “Yes.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Actually this wasn’t even supposed to be possible.”

Bal joined us before the food arrived. The hotel’s penthouse restaurant was so expensive that it served real rather than vatgrown bacon and eggs, but I was too dazed to notice any difference.

“The important thing is that you don’t tell anyone,” Bal said.

“What happens if I do?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Probably nothing. It’s apparently not possible to travel to intervals where you could actually change…”

“History,” I finished for him.

“We think,” Ariel said. “We’re not sure. It also seems like anyone who intends to try to change things just doesn’t go. There are theories that this is anthropic and we live in the universe where they don’t go because the universe where they do ceases to exist. But we don’t really know. It’s not like you can’t change anything. Minor changes are fine, we call them time slips, history seems to just sort of roll on. If anything minor but completely inexplicable ever happens in your life, it’s probably part of a time slip.”

“How often do you…I mean, from your point of view…or mine too, I guess…” It was difficult to even discuss the subject.

“Not often,” Bal said. “Maybe popular eras like this get a lot of visitors, a lot of time slips. But for us, at least, it takes a lot of energy to go at all. Varying nonlinearly with the size of the interval. Thousands of people would have loved to come here for the whole con, but only we were selected. There’ll be more for the Hugo ceremony, though.”

Ariel gave him a sharp look, clearly wishing he hadn’t revealed that. He flushed guiltily.

“Wait,” I said, “why would so many people want to come to this con? I mean, it’s fun, but…And why do you want to talk to Lauren so much?”

“Not just her,” Bal said. “Last night we had drinks with Peter Watts. Peter Watts!” He shook his head. “He’s much warmer than I imagined. Much more human.”

“Much funnier,” Ariel said, but her smile was sad.

“But why Lauren?” I persisted. “Does she win Hugos and become world famous or something?”

They said nothing but Bal’s expression grew more dour and Ariel’s more anxious.

“Then why…” An idea hit me. A horrifying idea. “Wait. Were you really at last year’s Worldcon?”

“No,” Bal admitted. Ariel looked like she wanted to hit him.

“So why did you come to this one?” I demanded.

Their silence was ice in my spine.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s because there isn’t going to be another one, is there. This is the last one.”

They didn’t reply. They didn’t need to. They would have been terrible poker players.

“Is it the con? The community?” I asked, hoping against hope. But no. “Is it the whole world? …Oh my God. Oh, Jesus. What happens?”

I stared at them wide-eyed as my world, my dying world, tilted on its axis.

Bal said, “We can’t tell you anything, and you can’t tell anyone.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” Ariel said firmly. “But you still shouldn’t.”

The food arrived. As we ate, in silence, I thought of what I wanted most, what mattered most to me. This was had one chance to make requests. To try and change my own personal timeline.

“I’ll do what you want on one condition,” I said. “We tell one other person. Only one. Then no one else.”

“Who?” Bal asked.

“Who do you think?”

She was at “Utopia/Dystopia: A False Dichotomy?” I knew she would be. I’d read The Changeling Wind after all. We waited for her at the door. When she saw me her eyes went flat and hard.

“This is Bal, this is Ariel,” I introduced, carefully breezily. “They’re fans of your work. Big fans. Especially of Still Life with Stegosaurs and The Changeling Wind. Also some stuff you haven’t written yet.”

She eyed me warily, confused by my affect as much as my words. “That’s impossible.”

“It sure is,” I agreed. “But it’s true. I’ll leave you all to talk amongst yourselves.”

I went back to my room and waited for the knock on the door. I knew she would come. It was arguably horribly manipulative of me. Because when you’re one of only two people who knows that the world is going end, how can you not want to speak to the other?

When I opened the door to her she looked years older, her face lined and drawn.

“They say we can’t do anything.” Her was voice so low I had to strain to hear. “It can’t be true. There has to be something.”

I shrugged. “No one will listen. No one will believe us except each other.”

“Why did you bring them to me?”

I said, half-honestly, “I thought you would want to know.”

She nodded, slowly.

“Did they tell you anything about what happens?” I asked.

“No.”

I took a deep breath. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She started to cry. “I don’t know, how am I supposed to know, I don’t know anything—“

And I stepped forward and hugged her. Held her. Whispered in her ear that we would both get through it, somehow, we would find a way, that we would somehow be OK even if the world wouldn’t. I didn’t really believe it, but that didn’t matter. I had her in my arms again.

She pulled away and I feared the worst, but she looked up at me with eyes bright with tears and said, “Linda, I’m sorry I got so angry. I don’t know what I was thinking. It all seems so trivial now. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK,” I told her, and it felt like the truth.

“I need to go be alone now. But I wanted you to know. I’m really sorry.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?”

“OK,” I whispered.

Under the circumstances it felt awful, even evil, to feel so wonderful as she walked away.

Day Three

I woke up early, dying to text Lauren, but I made myself wait. She needed time. Instead I went up to Bal and Ariel’s room and knocked on the door. They didn’t seem particularly excited to see me, but I didn’t care.

“I just wanted to ask,” I said, “why were there thousands of people who wanted to come to this? I would think it would all be forgotten…”

Bal shook his head. “Not forgotten. Lost. The storage media you use today is so ephemeral, compared to paper or pitted aluminium. In our time, we have surpassed the ancients in some ways, but there are still not so many of us, and very few who tell stories.”

“Ancients?”

“You,” Ariel said simply.

“There are billions of you. Millions of storytellers.” Bal seemed awed by the numbers. “Your stories, they lit the way to our rediscoveries, and then our new discoveries. We have been collecting as many as we can, while we were here, and meeting their creators. What we have learned, so many of our people will want to know.”

“Are your friends here yet?” I asked. “The ones coming to the Hugo ceremony?”

They exchanged an uncomfortable look. “No,” Ariel admitted.

“We don’t understand why,” Bal confided. Ariel sighed aloud, but he continued: “They would never have intended to change anything. I’m sure of it. I wonder if this has somehow become a nexus point, if this is no longer an interval that one can travel back to, because one could cause a major change.”

I didn’t understand. “But then how did you—“

“It wasn’t, in our frame of reference, when we came here,” Ariel said. “But maybe something has changed that.” Her expression made it clear that she suspected that something was me.

“Wait,” I said, “does this mean maybe we can change the future? Somehow? At least a little?”

After a brief silence, during which I realized that changing the future implied erasing the existence of the people I was talking to, Ariel said curtly, “We don’t pretend to understand everything.”

I left them soon after that. There are some levels of social awkwardness even I can’t ignore. The rest of the day passed in a blur; if this was to be the last Worldcon, because civilization as we knew it was coming to a horrifying end in the next year, then I wanted to soak in as much of it as I can. Like dining at a glorious buffet in the last five minutes before it closed, while knowing that you’d be starved for weeks afterwards.

As agreed, I texted Lauren where I was going, every time I changed venue, hoping that she would join me; but she did not reply. I was beginning to fear that she had changed her mind, when my phone vibed with a request from her that she sit with me at the Hugo awards. It was hard to wait the five minutes required to feign a certain amount of cool distance before writing back “OK.”

I wondered if I would prefer the end of the world with Lauren or the continuation of civilization without. It was wrong of me, I know, selfish. I don’t pretend to be a good person. But I wanted the former a thousand times more than the latter.

Bal and Ariel sat with us. Their friends had never arrived. Was that hope for the future, or just another kind of time slip?

Just before Best Novel was awarded, Bal leaned over, and whispered to us, greatly daring, “You should move out of the Junction.”

I shivered and looked at Lauren. She looked as shaken as I felt. Did it start here? What happened in the Junction?

“Thank you,” I whispered back.

I looked at the Hugo nominees up front and wondered how many of them would survive the next year.

“I’m really scared,” Lauren murmured into my ear, as her arm snaked around my waist.

“Me too,” I said, and kissed her.

I don’t know how long that kiss lasted, but when it was over, the two seats beside us were empty.

**********************************************

"I do so very much want to go to a Worldcon," Maya says, "What a very clever story. But sad too."

"Time travellers," he says. "And yes, very clever. Full of layers and clever things, well thought through. I wish Jon Evans would write more science fiction, he'd be good at it."

"What does he usually write?" Maya asks.

"Travel thrillers -- they're great too. He's won awards for them. Thriller awards. I don't knopw what they're called. And he also wrote a fun book about squirrels in New York City. You'd enjoy that one." He smiles. "But that story doesn't have any food. I could go back into my book to get us some, or we could look for some in the next book."

"Let's do that," she says. "I don't like it when you're gone."

"All right," he says. "We have the first glimpse of a book by Madeleine Robins with the working title of Wake."

She takes it, and they read.